Writing Lives

Tsano

34 My name is Gubha Jamela. Gubha means to scoop a hole in the ground in Ndebele, and now I’m digging mass graves. Was this my destiny when my parents named me? Crazy as it seems, I’m happy doing this. People need to be buried. No one needs to be told that. And I’m burying my people. It’s the last good thing I can do for them to ensure their souls rest in peace and their progeny lead normal lives. That is, once all this is over. Even these soldiers – especially those who’ve maimed and killed – know that when a dead body isn’t buried, its soul will roam the earth upsetting the living; this is why I’m now their man with a pick and shovel. There are still some bodies that haven’t been buried, like those I saw from the bus on the last day of my freedom. The soldiers say they want to wipe out all the Ndebele people. They say the Ndebeles do not belong in Zimbabwe, that their home is in Zululand from where they ran away with their leader Mzilikazi, fleeing the rule of King Tshaka. They say that Zimbabwe belongs to them, the Shona. And the soldiers aren’t joking. No, they’re killing everybody – men, women and children, even livestock. They’re also burning everything Tsano Christopher Mlalazi 35 Tsano by Christopher Mlalazi – homes, fields, granaries – they say, quite openly, that they want to starve to death those they haven’t already butchered. And now I’m one of their official gravediggers. There are four of us. Every morning they give us picks and shovels, and every morning at a new site in the forest we dig a grave as wide as a house, and as deep as two men standing on top of each other. At sunset, we fill the hole with the day’s murderous harvest. Sometimes, we fill them immediately after a killing – if it’s done on site – otherwise the bodies are brought in by army truck like tainted carcasses from a condemned abattoir. *** I’d heard in the city that soldiers were killing people in the rural areas, but the words didn’t convey the horror of it. I’d never seen a murdered corpse lying on the ground before. Yes, at wakes, I’d seen bodies in their coffins but never one lying on the ground with flies hovering over it, or one swollen like a balloon about to burst, or smelling bad, like rotting meat. *** I’d left the protection of the city to fetch my family from Mbongolo, my village. What else could one do? The village is where we belong. I was born there and my umbilical cord is buried there. I’d heard that the soldiers were in Tsholotsho, in Matabeleland North, I’d heard the stories that they were killing people like we kill intethe in the fields; that they were burning villages, raping women, but I hadn’t thought that they’d go to my village of Mbongolo in Matebeleland South, it seemed so far away from Tsholotsho. But now they’re here in Mbongolo, and we’re disappearing from the face of the earth faster than you can cry, ‘Dear Lord, please save us’. When Mzilikazi, who’d been a commander in Tshaka’s army, fled Zululand with his Ndebele people in the nineteenth century, he found people already living here: the Kalanga, the Tonga, the Venda, amongst others. He defeated them, and took their lands, incorporating some of them into his new Kingdom of the Ndebele. Of course, he must’ve killed some of them – those were the times of amabutho and conquest. Then, from his new kingdom, Mzilikazi launched raids into the northern part of the country, and his warriors killed the Shona and took their cattle; he also incorporated some of them into the new Ndebele king- 36 Writing Lives dom. Everyone knows this story. It’s in the history books, and even those who did not attend school know it, but it all happened over a century ago. So, how is it, that now, just three years after Independence, red-bereted Shona soldiers have come to Matabeleland breathing hellfire, and every time they order people to jump into the graves we’ve dug, some of them scream that they are revenging Mzilikazi’s sins...